A comparison of dates shows, however, that such a letter, if despatched from Coppet, could only have reached Paris twenty-four hours after Mr. Crawford’s departure, and Thiers’ assumption that Madame de Staël remained in Paris during the Hundred Days is disproved by her correspondence from Switzerland with Madame Récamier. Finally, and again according to Thiers, Sismondi’s conversion was a result of Madame de Staël’s own change of views. But this also appears quite untenable, inasmuch as Sismondi himself bears testimony to her resentment against Napoleon, strengthened, as he says, “to a blind and violent hatred.” This is the natural language of a person who _has_ veered about of another person who has _not_, and the expression occurs in a letter of Sismondi’s written from Coppet a short time after Waterloo, and when he had gone to the château in some doubt as to the nature of the reception there awaiting him. He had been much relieved to find his hostess as cordial as ever. Madame de Staël, indeed, never seems to have willingly or spontaneously given up any friend whom she had once admitted to the title. Politics are apt to envenom the most intimate relations, but they left no bitterness in _her_ great and gentle soul. Alas! the happy days at Coppet were numbered now for most of those whom we have seen congregating there through so many exciting summers. Madame de Staël delighted in the exercise of a generous hospitality. Nobody ever seems to have managed her business affairs better than she did, and among the few apparent contradictions of her transparent nature was the spirit of order in which she dealt with life, as soon as the things presented to her consideration were hard facts and not sentiments. In all administrative matters she had the capacity of a true Frenchwoman, and, while systematic and careful, was the least avaricious of women. CHAPTER XIV. CLOSING SCENES. After Waterloo, Madame de Staël did not return to France. The thought of the second occupation by foreign troops was odious to her, and, besides this, she feared the outbreak of reactionary feelings, and foresaw a political condition in which her pure and ideal liberalism would be equally unwelcome to all parties. Rocca’s state of health finally induced her to go to Italy. From Milan she sent a letter to Madame Récamier, which is interesting as showing how little her fine mind and noble heart were in harmony just then with the condition of affairs in France.